Insight

GB System Performance Report – September 2016

Aurora’s System performance report provides a monthly snapshot of key operating characteristics for the GB power system. Which fuels are most used? Which power plants most profitable? How would a change in the price of gas or coal impact the system price through the dispatch?

Highlights of our September report include:

With the hottest recorded September day in a hundred years, unseasonably warm weather triggers a spike in demand for cooling.

This, coinciding with a string of generator closures, causes capacity margins to drop dramatically, and drives a sharp increase in uplift and profits.

Amid fears of a capacity shortfall of almost 1GW, prices in the day-ahead power market rise to £160/MWh, followed by the half-hourly auction reaching an unprecedented £999/MWh.

Coal plants come online to take advantage of the high prices, achieving average gross margins of £26/MWh – their highest since March 2013 – and more than doubling their load factor and output since last month.

With scarcity driving the price increase, wind capture prices make a healthy recovery from the summer lows, but maintain a steady gap relative to baseload prices of over £4/MWh.

As coal plant production increases, we see a corresponding rise in GB power carbon intensity since last month, although the decrease since this time last year remains fairly consistent at around 30%.

Aurora’s Company performance report presents a summary of the operational and financial performance of all major participants in the GB wholesale power market. The key statistics include companies’ revenues and profits, outputs, capacities, capture prices and load factors. All the metrics are presented for the entire generating portfolios, their subsets for each technology, as well as for individual assets. The report also presents the evolution of companies’ market shares over time.

Aurora’s Power plant performance summary provides a monthly snapshot of financial and operating performance for individual plants on the GB electricity grid. We collate, clean, and process the data so that it is readily digestible and error-free.